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Rights and WrongsLiberals, progressives, and biotechnology.

By William SaletanPosted Friday, July 13, 2007, at 3:14 PM ET

Leon Kass, leader of the neocon packThis week, some big thinkers about biotechnology came to Washington for a "progressive bioethics summit." They invited me to go and talk to them. I like these people, but I'm not a progressive. I don't even think the word makes sense. And that made me ask something else: After two and a half years of covering moral debates about stem cells and other technologies, what do I think of this stuff? What the hell am I?

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I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about religion as though it's a communicable disease. Some are amazingly obtuse to other people's qualms. They show no more interest in an embryo than in a skin cell. It's like I'm picking up a radio signal and they're not. I'd think I was crazy, except that a few billion other people seem to be picking up the same signal. At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion.

I also hate the word progressive. It manages to be arrogant and meaningless at the same time, as though anything the left wants to do is a good idea. I suppose it's no more arrogant than values, the Republican buzzword for whatever conservatives want to do.

Lately, "progressives" have taken to issuing talking points. Every time a peer-reviewed science journal reports some new way of deriving embryonic stem cells without having to kill embryos, I can count on receiving a "progressive bioethics" e-mail that warns me not to be distracted by such fantasies. Bioethics has become politics by another name.

Why are liberals playing this game? Because conservatives beat them to it. For the past several days, while eating lunch at my desk, I've been watching video of the liberals at a conference they held last year. I know, I need to get a life. But the video is kind of poignant. It shows a bunch of nerds commiserating about being beaten up by a gang of bullies. The bullies, according to the nerd movie, are Bush-appointed neoconservative bioethicists who do the bidding of the Christian right.

To fend off the bullies, the nerds have seized on stem cells. Some of them think embryonic stem-cell cures are just around the corner. Others know better but believe in the research anyway. What unites them is awareness that stem cells score very well in polls, much better than anything else on their agenda. Of 32 commentaries posted on the Web page of the "Progressive Bioethics Initiative," 26 focus on stem cells. Some don't even address ethics; they just lay out the polls. Stem cells are a chance for liberal bioethicists to beat the living daylights out of their opponents.

I don't like this gamesmanship. I don't even like the idea of taking a general position on biotechnology. The field is just too big and complicated to fit an ideology. In science, things change much more radically than in politics. One month, we're screening embryos for diseases, and everybody's happy. The next month, we're screening embryos for their suitability as tissue donors, and everybody's queasy. One year, ethanol is a corn product and makes no sense. The next year, it's a switchgrass product and makes a lot of sense. I like having the freedom to soak my head in a new topic and come out saying the opposite of what I expected. Committing to a political identity would just get in the way.

Then what makes me think I'm still a liberal? I guess it's a stubborn belief that liberalism isn't whatever dogmas currently possess this or that lefty camp. Liberalism is an admission of uncertainty. It's open to self-correction and to the complexity and unpredictability of life. Many ethicists and other self-described liberals don't fit or accept that definition. But I do.

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So I went to talk to them last night. I bitched about the atheism, the talking points, and the word progressive. I made a pitch for my version of liberalism. The freedom to strip-mine embryos, have a baby at 60, or kill yourself can't be the end of the story. Not everything that's legal is moral. The most interesting moral questions aren't the ones you can settle with simple rules. They're the subtle ones you find in literature and real life.

Conservative bioethicists think that when we recoil at something in this gray area, our repugnance signals a moral problem. Liberal bioethicists dismiss this argument as "fuzzy intuitionism" based on an illogical "yuck factor." The liberals are making a big mistake. Fuzz and yuck are very real. They're a lot more real to most people than bioethics is. You can't just ignore them or wish them away. You have to help people sort them out and honor their concerns in a way that doesn't require prohibition. An embryo may be less than a person, but it's more than a tissue source. The government can't stop you from having a baby at 60, but don't be so reckless.

The best way to deal with repugnance is to listen to it, articulate it, and incorporate it. It's part of morality, even when, as an argument for prohibition, it's overruled. The answer to conservatives who believe in one truth is not that there are no truths but that there are many, and this one, while important, isn't final. The result shouldn't be chaos. It should be structure.

That's what I told the liberals last night. And you know what? They listened, asked questions, challenged me, admitted uncertainties, told me some things I didn't know, and gave me new problems to think about. Everything was open for debate: agreement, disagreement, and doubt. As long as it stays that way, I'll be one of them. I think.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Photograph of Leon Kass from Wikipedia. Photograph of embryo on the Slate home page courtesy Wikipedia.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Until more Americans can look past sloganeering, whoever has the best slogans will win.

I think Saletan, in arguing that liberals should make a case for the complexity of this issue, forgets that we're living in a time when talking points and sound bites have taken the place of serious debate. Complexity, subtlety, and nuance are all dirty words. Thinking too much makes one an "elitist."

You can explain stem cell research until the cows come home, when your opponent steps to the mic and calls you a murderer, he wins.

--Lono

(To reply, click here.)

I am glad that you acknowledge that embryos are more than just "tissue." In fact, I would say that, by definition, they are human life. Just because they are at such an early stage of human life that they lack capacity for brain function is no reason to assume the right to "stripmine" them. I believe in protecting human life and allowing it the chance to develop into full personhood.

I think liberals are threatened by potential obsolescence of their positions regarding embryonic stem cells. They hate that after all their clamoring against conservatives on this issue, alternatives can be found and the whole problem side-stepped. They should be grateful and hopeful for a way out of the moral dilemma but instead it's like they thrive on the dramatic show-down of scientific progress vs. ethics.

--Bobbo

(To reply, click here.)

I'm disgusted by shellfish. Many others won't touch pork, or any meat at all. And most people on this planet believe urine to be unclean, though it is sterile. I fail to see how disgust should contribute to the formation of a coherent political or scientific plan. People are disgusted by things not necessarily from any inherent, reflexive, human reaction, but rather because they have been told and taught to believe something is disgusting since they were small children, often in the guise of religion.

This is why scientists don't want to touch the repugnance argument: because repugnance isn't objective, as science generally strives to be. And disgust certainly isn't rational. Let's be reasonable - as someone who has few if any moral qualms about our advances in biotechnology, I still recognize that there are numerous pragmatic reasons for putting the brakes on specific technologies: research dollars could be better spent elsewhere, biotechnology could lead to a world of genetic haves versus have-nots, and the science is in some cases simply not ready. But as far as reasons go for not supporting biotechnology, "this gives me the willies" ought not be one of them.

--Kasey4

(To reply, click here.)

Saletan writes that he believes that "The best way to deal with repugnance is to listen to it, articulate it, and incorporate it."

This seems, at first glance, compelling. Perhaps a feeling of repugnance is significant of a deeper wisdom that we can not yet articulate, and we would then ignore it to out later sorrow.

But consider practically any instance of a moral question now settled. In the United States, it is convenient to use questions of race. Let us imagine ourselves back 60 years into our past and see what the wisdom of repugnance would have told us about interracial marriage.

There is no doubt that the idea of interracial sex was deeply repugnant to people at the time. What happened when people took this repugnance and followed Saletan's advice of "listen to it, articulate it, and incorporate it"? They came up with countless arguments that they convinced themselves were scientific to excuse their repugnance. Now we can see these arguments for what they are, but at the time they fooled those who listened to their repugnance.

The human faculty of reason is remarkably good at providing excuses for things, and no matter what the object of repugnance is, if you start from the standpoint of trying to find some way to incorporate it into your morality, you will.

Saletan was right about one thing, and that is the importance of the admission of uncertainty. Too bad he doesn't apply this self-doubt where it is needed the most: our feelings of repugnance.

--Clifton

(To reply, click here.)

(7/15)

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